2021 Accomplishments & 2022 Plans
The year 2021 was yet another banner year for the Electronic Literature Lab. Working remotely during the pandemic via Slack, Basecamp, and Zoom, the ELL Team undertook and completed many projects. Here is the list: Led the creation of The NEXT, moving from the prototype built on the Samvera platform into Semantic Markup and ARIA, and enhancing the content by adding several new collections, hosting three exhibitions, and adding over 5000 images and 50 videos. Led the reconstruction of Richard Holeton’s hypertext novel Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, published originally in 2001 on the Storyspace platform, into open web languages. Led the reconstruction of Thomas M. Disch’s interactive novel Amnesia,…
Resurrecting Flash: Hands-On Workshop
Resurrecting Flash Art Hands-on workshop hosted via Zoom by the Electronic Literature Lab with guest speaker: Alan Bigelow 28-29 October 2021; 8:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. PST For more information, contact Dene Grigar dgrigar[at]wsu[dot]edu This 2-day, hands-on, workshop provides participants with experience for preserving Flash art using a variety of tools and methods. Participants are encouraged to bring in works of their own to save or choose from among those provided by the workshop organizers. Instruction will be provided over Zoom and Slack, with Basecamp serving as the archival space for docs and files. No previous experience with preservation is needed. At the end of the workshop, participants will have worked alone or in…
Remembering Amnesia
The lab will be leading the re-development of Thomas M. Disch’s interactive fiction game, Amnesia, published by Electronic Arts in 1986. The lab became interested in the game in 2017 when artist Sarah Smith sent us a copy of it while we were in the midst of documenting her interactive game, King of Space for Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 1 and decided to devote a chapter to Amnesia in the book. Fast forward three and a half years later. We are in the throes of planning a version of it for contemporary computing devices. Originally released for the Apple II computer, it was later released for the Commodore 64 and PC,…
Welcome Richard Snyder
Richard Snyder joins the Electronic Literature Lab as its new Assistant Director on July 1, 2021. He began working with us in March 2021 specifically to fine tune the metadata for the 2500+ works held in The NEXT. His duties expanded into writing descriptions for those works missing that information and serving as a liaison between the lab and artists with collections in The NEXT. He is a PhD Candidate at Washington State University Vancouver’s English Department where his research focuses on intersections of word and images in literary media. As part of his dissertation research, he is currently developing Early Modern Visual Reader (EMVR), a digital platform that remediates…
Ruffle Preservation Report #2
This is second report about the work the lab is doing to preserve born-digital literature created with Adobe Flash. Today the team (CMDC juniors Andrew Thompson and Arlo Ptolemy) finished implementing Ruffle on the works published in the Electronic Literature Collections, Volumes 1, 2 and 3. This week we will begin adding scholarly commentary to their intro pages to alert visitors about their accessibility. Sadly, of the 235 works published in the three anthologies, only 16 could be preserved with Ruffle. Some others appear to function, but when compared to their original files (using the Pale Moon browser on a Windows computer) actually showed problems. The sound files in Maria Mencia’s “Birds…
The Electronic Literature Repository
Last Tuesday Holly and I gave a presentation at the ELO Salon hosted by Deena Larsen about the Electronic Literature Repository. The lab has been managing the site since its creation and is now in the process of moving into phase 3 of its development. The Repository is envisioned as the next generation exhibition and preservation space that will function as an open-access, online library/museum/archival site. Created in 2018-2019 with seed funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Repository currently holds 26 collections of 2207 pieces of born-digital literary art. The works held in the Repository include a wide variety of genres, such as hypertext novels, poetry, and essays;…
Traversal of Carolyn Guyer’s Quibbling
Thursday, 11/12, 2020 10 a.m.-11:30 a.m. PST Live on YouTube: http://youtube.com/c/electronicliteraturelab #ELitLab Join us for a live YouTube event: A playthrough of Carolyn Guyer’s hypertext narrative Quibbling (1992, 1996). For the playthrough we’ll be using the 3.5-inch floppy disk version on a Macintosh Classic II, running System Software 7.1. Performing the work is the author Carolyn Guyer. Following her performance there will be a Q&A that includes the author, hypertext scholar and ELL Research Affiliate, Mariusz Pisarski, and Dene Grigar. Safety precautions due to COVID-19 means we will be using a combination of Zoom, YouTube, and OBS software to allow Guyer from New York State to remotely guide Grigar in…
11 FAQs about Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story
For the past month I have been preparing for the live group reading of Michael Joyce’s hypertext novel, afternoon, a story and the paper Richard Snyder and I are giving about hypertext at the ELO 2020 conference. My research led to: identifying every available manifestation of the work renumbering past editions and organizing them with the, heretofore, unidentified editions so that there is consistency throughout all of the manifestations of the novel versioning the novel according to changes to software so that it is easier for scholars to know what tech to use when accessing it tracking down more precise publication dates through email interviews, databases, and the Internet Archive…
Launch of The Digital Review
Launch of The Digital Review Thursday, June 11, 2020 10:30 a.m.-1:30 a.m. At TDR’s Twitter site: https://twitter.com/tdrbark We are very excited to announce the launch of the new journal, The Digital Review (TDR), a sibling online publication of the electronic book review, founded and edited by CMDC faculty member, Will Luers, and supported by a research grant from Washington State University. TDR is an annual journal dedicated to the preservation and publication of innovative, born-digital essays. Each theme-based issue will offer a curated combination of commissioned work, submitted work and “rediscovered” work. It draws inspiration from journals, like Vectors (2005-2007), which commissioned individual artist to create collaborative code, craft, and critical writing; Kairos, a long-established…
Treasures from The Dene Grigar Collection
The Electronic Literature Lab holds the collection of over 300 works electronic literature, video games, and interactive media, along with the hardware and peripherals with with to view the work, collected for the last 29 years by Dene Grigar. The collection highlights include all works of electronic literature published by Eastgate Systems, Inc.; posters, catalogs, and proceedings from many conferences and media art shows that featured electronic literature; books and other printed materials published to accompany born digital works. The items featured in this exhibit, however, are among the rarest in her collection because they represent one of the last, the only iteration of a work or unique work.…
